


To Find a Way Home

by octoberburns



Series: Salmon-Swift, its Captain, and Her People [4]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Established Relationship, Fantasy, Funerary Customs, M/M, Orc Culture & Customs, Orcs, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-25 12:15:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22356112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/octoberburns/pseuds/octoberburns
Summary: Thruuna suffers an ignominious awakening at the hands (or rather, feet) of his beloved husband to learn the captain requires him. Ruulo is kind and good-hearted and by all accounts trustworthy—but she's still a witch. And once, long ago, an unknown orc was left alone, and had to make perhaps the hardest choice of all.
Series: Salmon-Swift, its Captain, and Her People [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1428919
Kudos: 5





	To Find a Way Home

**Author's Note:**

> A belated December offering. My beloved supporters this month inflicted upon me a prompt from the [Norse Saga Bot](https://twitter.com/NorseSagaBot/status/1200358780279705601) on twitter: _[Urig] wakes his husband with his cold, wet feet, while [Thruuna] has no idea what the proper reward for a poem is._ It ended up going a bit sideways from the brief, but Urig very much does wake his husband with his cold, wet feet, which is I think what everyone wanted the most anyway. Here you go, nerds. I hope this makes you happy.
> 
> Thanks as ever to Ashley, Alex, and the rest of the crew for your support!

When Thruuna wakes that morning, it is to the cool air of the summer seas at dawn, the fresh scent of a world wiped clean by rain, and the high thin calls of distant seabirds—and a cold, wet sensation pressed against the small of his back.

He does not open his eyes. “Urig, by the seas and stars,” he says, “if you’ve put your feet inside my shirt again…”

Urig—properly Urigish, his husband of three years—is insultingly unrepentant. “You need to get up anyway,” he says. He does not move his frigid feet. Pleasantly, Thruuna decides he is going to kill him.

“Do I,” he says flatly, and opens his eyes. _Salmon-Swift_ puts up sailcloth storm covers when they’re anchored in bad weather and sheltered from the wind; judging by the light now filtering down through them, the sun is barely over the horizon. “And why, exactly, am I needed so desperately, a whole hour before the end of my sleep shift?”

Urig is looking bright and lively himself, even though they normally sleep the same shift and this is thus an equally unreasonable hour for him—to say nothing of however much earlier he must have woken, to be back on the ship already after last night’s storm kept him, the captain, and the rest of the resupply party on Kagdish overnight. And Urig at his best is a creature of play and good humour: so Thruuna is accordingly expecting that the only thing requiring his wakefulness at this moment is some bit of his husband’s usual silliness.

He is brought up rather short when Urig instead says, “Captain wants you. She’s putting another party together to go back to the island.”

Thruuna sits up abruptly, conveniently dislodging Urig’s feet from inside the back of his shirt. “What?” he says. “Why? We were meant to sail again as soon as you returned with supplies. What’s going on?”

Urig smiles then, his broad green cheeks breaking into the dimples that Thruuna is still, after all these years, hopelessly enraptured by. “We found something.”

There is a pause. “Urig,” Thruuna says severely, “stop being mysterious.”

Urig laughs. “You know the cliffs around the back of the village?”

“Yes,” Thruuna says. The village, nameless, is the only settlement on the remote island of Kagdish, whose ground slopes from an easy ascent at one end up to a rocky cliff face at the other. It has been part of _Salmon-Swift_ ’s regular summer trading route for six years.

“There was a rockslide a few months ago, during the spring thaw. After it settled some of the children went down to the shore at the foot of the rocks to investigate. They found some caves there,” Urig says, with great relish. “There’s a cavern at the back with some strange things in it—carvings and symbols and stuff. The headman asked the captain to take a look, since she’s so widely-travelled, and she thinks it might be magic.”

Thruuna digests this information for a long moment. That the captain wants to go back to investigate properly is only reasonable, especially given her history, but what he can’t make sense of is— “Why does she want me? I don’t know anything about magic.”

“Oh, right, that,” Urig says. “There’s some writing. It’s in Hanga.”

“Oh,” Thruuna says. “I suppose that would do, yes.”

The languages of the Haaol Sea are similar enough to the ear that their speakers can all talk to each other, no matter their mother tongue. Captain Vaar is an Islander, but she sails out of Baraag, a Brazhni town, and conducts her business in Brazhni. Much of her crew is Brazhni as well, or grew up speaking the language with traders, but even those who didn’t—like Thruuna, Urig, and the witch Ruulo—can easily make themselves understood in conversation.

In writing, however, is another story. The orcish languages use a common script, but each has its own quirks and some few unique letters; what sounds like one character to a Brazhni ear may be a wholly different one to an Uralg, and even Hanga and Islander—disconcertingly similar even to their native speakers—have an entirely distinct way of rendering their vowels. Captain Vaar is educated, and knows how to read and write in every language she speaks, but Hanga isn’t one of them. But Thruuna is a Hanga orc—the Copper People of the continental southwest, rusty-skinned and light-haired and vibrantly blue-eyed: one of two aboard _Salmon-Swift_ , and the only one who can read.

“Well,” he says. “I ought not keep the captain waiting.”

Urig beams. “That’s the spirit. Time to get up, Thruuna.”

He’s right, but Thruuna flicks him in the tusk and shoves him away anyway.

It’s strange that there should be something written in Hanga on a remote northern island, he muses to himself while digging breakfast out of _Salmon-Swift_ ’s stores. It’s rare enough for his people to go to sea at all—the climate Thruuna hails from is dry, and the Hanga are better known for their overland caravans. That it’s so far into the Brazhni region is doubly unusual. He can’t help wondering who was responsible for the writing, and what they were doing so far from home.

Picking at the oddity provides him no answers, though—even though he thinks on it all through breaking fast and performing his morning ablutions. He only manages to set it aside when he steps onto the rear deck to join the captain and the rest of the small party she’s putting together.

Captain Vaar is as reassuringly impassive as ever. She nods once to him as he arrives, her hands clasped behind her back. “Thruuna. My apologies for the early awakening,” she says. “I would like to have this dealt with as soon as possible so as not to miss the tide entirely.”

“No harm in it, Captain,” he assures her. “I could have done without my husband’s particular methods, but you are not responsible for Urig’s life choices.”

The captain doesn’t react to that—not that he can see, anyway—but next to her Grir looks away to conceal a smile, and Kurzh does a very credible job of turning a laugh into a cough.

“Is this everyone?” says Eruuk, tipping his head in acknowledgement to Thruuna. There are four of them, not including the captain; aside from Eruuk and Thruuna, both Hanga, Grir is a skilled diver with experience exploring caves, and Kurzh is broad and strong and good to have as backup in case things go wrong. He is also loaded down with three torches and a pick.

“Not quite. We’re waiting for—ah,” the captain says, then stops.

For the final member of their party has arrived: Ruulo, the witch, sweet and smiling and so pale she nearly glows. She beams at Kurzh as he hands her up onto the rear deck, then looks around at them all, her fingers folding neatly together in front of her body. “Good morning, Captain,” she says. “Sorry to make you wait. I’m ready to leave.”

“Then let us be off,” the captain says. She doesn’t smile, though from the look Ruulo gives her she might as well have.

“Captain.”

 _Salmon-Swift_ is at anchor at the single wooden jetty in the sheltered cove that serves as Kagdish’s harbour. Kurzh, the tallest of their party, clambers from the ship to the jetty and then hands them across the gap one by one, beginning with Ruulo and ending with Thruuna. Captain Vaar steps across herself with her usual perfect self-assurance, and starts towards the beach, where a scuffed footpath will lead them around the island to the cliffside shore.

Thruuna has gotten used to working on a ship with a witch, but that’s not to say he’s entirely comfortable drawing Ruulo’s attention himself. He can read the same hesitation in the eyes of Grir and Eruuk, and by unspoken agreement the three of them fall back to let Kurzh walk beside her instead. His friendship with her is entirely sincere, in any case, and he seems thoroughly pleased to have the chance to chat with her about the Kagdish plant life and last night’s storm and what they might find when they come to the cavern.

Grir takes the lead once they arrive at the cave, stepping with sure feet in her soft leather shoes as she assesses the stability of the rock. “Looks alright,” she says finally. “Keep an eye out, walk cautious, and don’t make too much noise.”

Kurzh lights the torches, keeping one for himself and passing the others off to Grir and Thruuna, and the party advances into the caves. Captain Vaar, as the only one among them who has seen the cavern they’re bound for, steps up to join Grir at the front of the party. They squeeze through branching passages and duck under dripping stalactites and pass strange, rippling flows of rock that look like they’d somehow be soft to the touch. There’s no sign that the caves have ever been used for anything; for all Thruuna knows, they’re the first orcs to ever pass through here.

Then the cavern before them opens up into a chamber from legend. Stalactites and stalagmites ring its edges, meeting in the middle in strange pillared columns that look almost as though they were placed deliberately by someone’s hands. The ceiling soars to a high arc above them, its heights lost in the dim light from their torches. And at the centre of the smoothly sloping floor, heavy stones have been piled into a cairn, and decorated with elaborate carvings.

“Oh!” gasps Ruulo, that single startled syllable echoing across the cavern. “I can feel something! You were right, Captain, I think it is magic.” She frowns then, her lovely face made dramatic in the torchlight. “It’s… strange, though.”

“Strange how?” Captain Vaar says. She’s the only one, aside from Ruulo herself, who looks unbothered by this turn of conversation.

“It’s… muffled, somehow,” Ruulo says. She’s still frowning, her eyes half-closed, one hand extended towards nothing like she’s reaching out to someone. Her dialect, grown increasingly Brazhni since she joined their crew, is slipping back to its native Northern cadence. “It’s almost…”

They wait, watching her in frozen stillness—and then by no signal Thruuna can discern she seems to deflate, blowing out a heavy breath. “Lost it. I’m sorry, I can’t make sense of it. Whatever it is, it’s old. It might not be my kind of witchcraft at all.”

Captain Vaar nods, like that’s only to be expected. “Tell me if anything changes,” she orders. “Even if you have to interrupt us.”

“Yes, Captain.”

The captain turns to Thruuna. “I’ll show you where the writing is.”

Around the other side of the cairn, a flat stone has been braced against the rocks; the writing is carved into its face. Thruuna kneels before it and raises the torch, careful not to touch anything. Everything about this feels uneasy to him. What does he know from magic, he thinks desperately. But the captain is counting on him: there is no one else who can do this task.

Warily, he examines the text.

The orc who shaped the letters was no expert stone worker, but what skill they had has served: the writing is still clear, if slightly softened at the edges with age. All the same, it takes Thruuna some time to parse it fully. That it’s Hanga is unquestionable, but it doesn’t look like the Hanga he knows.

“I think this is a poem,” he says finally. “The writing is—archaic. Four, five hundred years old, perhaps. It will take me a moment to translate.”

“Take the time you need,” the captain says.

Thruuna bends closer to the rock. Out of habit he nearly lifts his hand to keep his place in the text, but stops before his fingers makes contact. He has no idea what kind of strange old magic is wrapped up in those ancient words.

“This part,” he says, indicating the first few lines of writing. “It’s the kind of thing you’d recite for someone who’s died. A story of their deeds and what they meant to people. It doesn’t use a name, just epithets—far-traveller, storm-challenger, guiding-star. Whoever this is, they must have been a sailor.”

“So it’s a grave site,” Captain Vaar says neutrally. “I suspected as much, from the cairn.”

“Yes, but no,” Thruuna says, as he sorts through the lines of the poem. “That is—it is a grave, certainly, but this isn’t just grave writing. The person who wrote this… it addresses the dead directly.” He clears his throat, then reads out, “‘Now I, heart’s-blood, bind you thusly: cease your wandering, walker of the waves. By word and ritual I rightly bind you; by love and legacy I lay you to rest.’” As he recites he can feel the hairs standing up on the back of his neck and can’t help but imagine it as the prickle of long-ago power. Abruptly he breaks off. “There’s more—specific ways of binding, strange things some of them. I don’t really understand it, Captain, I’m sorry.”

“I see,” the captain says, and pauses a moment in quiet reflection. She looks to the rest of the party. “Have any of you any idea what this might be about?”

Grir and Kurzh just shake their heads mutely; after a moment, Ruulo does as well. “I’m no help, I’m afraid,” she says. “We don’t even do this kind of grave cairn in the north. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

“I have,” says Eruuk.

Thruuna turns his eyes on him. Eruuk has been standing silently to the side of the chamber ever since they entered, patiently taking everything in. It’s easy to lose track of him in a group: the same stillness that makes him so skilled as a lookout also gives him a talent for fading into the background. Now he is looking nearly as uncomfortable as Thruuna feels, shifting his weight nervously, the line of his shoulders tense.

“Speak,” the captain says, as even and steadying a presence as ever.

Eruuk takes a breath. “It’s not common,” he begins. “But sometimes you hear stories—well. Everyone knows the dead might rise in the badlands, if they die somewhere far from home.”

Once again Thruuna feels that horrified prickle at the back of his neck.

But the captain forges onwards undaunted. “So the inscription is meant to prevent it?”

“Yes,” Eruuk says. “If it’s done by someone who loves them. People still do it sometimes, or the rites that go with it, but it’s just—superstition.” He makes a gesture with one hand, one Thruuna recognizes as a sign against evil common to the inland region of Hanga territory. “They say if the dead know they’re still loved, they won’t feel the need to come home. No one’s ever said it was magic.”

Thruuna looks back to the writing he’s still kneeling at. The thought of the dead rising has filled him with dread, but now he finds it tempered by a deep sorrow. What must it have been like, for these long-ago members of his people? To die so far from home, and to be left behind by the dying? And for the survivor to replicate—as best they could, all alone—a custom no one around them knew or understood: all to keep the person they loved from somehow choosing to follow them regardless?

If Urig died in similar circumstances, would Thruuna have the strength to bind his husband to his rest? Or would he risk the chance that the dead could rise, if it meant seeing the man he loved again?

He spreads his fingers against the text, in kinship and mourning, and finds himself saying, “What should we do?”

The Captain looks to Eruuk, but the lookout just shrugs. “I’ve never done it,” he says. “Just seen the cairns on the badlands trade routes, every once in a while. We should probably stop anyone else coming in here, though.”

“What do you do?” Ruulo says unexpectedly. “When you see the cairns in the badlands? Is there a custom?”

Eruuk shrugs again. “Leave water, usually. Sometimes other trinkets. Just the sort of things you put on graves.”

“We put flowers on graves here,” Kurzh says. “Would that be okay?”

Eruuk shares a look with Thruuna. “I don’t see why not,” Thruuna says. “It’s respect.”

The captain nods decisively. “Kurzh,” she says. “Go gather some flowers. You know the right kinds. As many as you can, as quickly as you can.”

“Yes, Captain,” Kurzh says, and hurries from the cavern.

“Grir,” Captain Vaar continues, “have a look around the entrance of the cavern and tell me what you think might be the best way to seal it off.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Eruuk, if you can think of any more of your people’s grave customs, now would be an excellent time to share.”

Eruuk and the captain begin discussing the best way to treat a Hanga grave, but Thruuna can’t bring himself to join in. He stays where he is. His hand is still resting against the text in silent communion when Ruulo slips over to him and kneels delicately at his side. “Can you translate for me?” she says. “The whole of it, not just the part you read before.”

Thruuna wants to ask what she needs it for, but he suspects he wouldn’t like the answer—so he just nods and does as she requests. She sits next him, repeating his words under her breath, her hands twisting together in measured strokes in her lap. About halfway through the poem Thruuna becomes conscious of a building sense of pressure emanating from the witch beside him and a growing nausea in his belly. He stumbles over the next line and turns to look at Ruulo; she meets his eyes in sympathy, but doesn’t stop her spell, and he knows in that moment that there is steel beneath her lovely exterior. Swallowing hard against the need to be sick, he carries on with the translation.

The horrid feeling reaches its peak as they reach the final line, and then dissipates like the foam of a wave trickling away across the sand. Shaky-legged, Thruuna stands, his instincts screaming for him to get away from Ruulo. Apologetically she moves out of his way, and he manages to contain his retreat to a rapid walk—but only barely. On the other side of the cavern, Eruuk is looking washed out and weak, and Grir is gripping tightly to a stalactite in front of her. Only the captain seems unaffected, though there’s an unaccustomed crease of tension across her forehead despite her otherwise impassive expression.

“Another binding?” she says evenly.

Ruulo nods. “A reinforcement, anyway. Or, at least—I hope it is. It really is a very different kind of magic.”

Kurzh returns then, his arms filled with bunches of the yellow blossoms that grow around the borders of the fields here, and saves everyone from having to dwell any longer on Ruulo’s unsettling display of witchcraft. Cleaning grit from the cairn and covering it over with flowers goes a long way to restoring Thruuna’s equilibrium, and by the time they’re finished, his horror has been replaced entirely by melancholy. He’s the last to leave as they file out of the cavern one by one, looking back over his shoulder into the darkness as if to impress upon his memory one final glimpse of a centuries-dead Hanga orc.

“Alright,” Captain Vaar says. “Grir. How do you recommend we block off the cavern?”

Grir points out several stalagmite pillars. “We should be safe to take those ones down. We can use them to fill the opening without bringing anything down on our heads.”

Kurzh lifts the pick inquiringly, but Ruulo interrupts. “Um,” she says, very apologetically. “I can do it, I think. And I can seal the rock to itself to stop anyone digging it out.” She looks around the group. “Maybe you should all wait outside.”

The captain looks at her for a long moment, then says, “I will stay with you while you work. The rest of you, wait on the shore.”

Thruuna is more than happy to comply. From the haste with which Eruuk and Grir exit the cavern, he is not the only one. Only Kurzh hesitates, flashing Ruulo a nervous smile and passing his torch to the captain before he follows the rest of them out.

It’s nearly an hour before Ruulo and Captain Vaar emerge from the caves, which Thruuna uses to catch up on his sleep. He rises brushing the sand from his back when they rejoin the party, and learns that Eruuk is the only one who spent their wait usefully: he has removed his shirt and used it to collect as many winkles as can fit into the bundled fabric, which will make an excellent addition to their usual foodstuffs of pickles and dried meat and ship’s biscuits. Grir, meanwhile, has spent the hour giving Kurzh swimming lessons, which means they’re both nearly nude and soaked to the skin.

Captain Vaar eyes the four of them—Kurzh and Grir dripping, Eruuk shirtless and fish-smelling, Thruuna still speckled all over with damp sand—with something like resignation. “Back to the ship,” she orders. “Tell Hishnak to make ready to sail. I’ll be along as soon as I inform the headman our business is finished here.”

“Yes, Captain,” they say, more or less in unison.

The captain looks them all over again, then settles on Thruuna as the least objectionable of a bad lot. “Make sure she gets back to the ship safely,” she says, nodding to Ruulo. The witch is sitting down on a large rock by the mouth of the cave, looking shaky and worn; her skin, always pale, is nearly white as chalk.

“Yes, Captain,” repeats Thruuna, though his animal hindbrain wants nothing more than to get away from Ruulo entirely.

He goes to her, despite his misgivings, as the other three start along the path back to the ship and Captain Vaar turns away in other direction towards the village. The smile she directs him is tired but sincere, and still tinged with apology. Thruuna expects his skin to crawl when she takes his arm to rise, but to his surprise her touch feels entirely ordinary—even soothing. Without saying anything, they begin making their way along the trail; Ruulo doesn’t stumble, and their slow pace feels almost stately.

“I’m sorry for disturbing you earlier,” she says finally.

She didn’t ask for this either, Thruuna thinks—any more than that long-ago Hanga orc asked to have to bind their lost loved one into the grave.

“Do you think we did anything?” he says. “With the magic, I mean. Did it help?”

But Ruulo only sighs and squeezes his arm a little tighter. “Honestly, I don’t know,” she says. “It certainly didn’t hurt, but it may be that the best we did was pay our respects to an old gravesite.”

“Worth doing for its own sake,” Thruuna observes.

“Oh, yes. Very much so.”

They’re silent for another few minutes, picking their measured way back towards the ship. At last they crest a rise, and _Salmon-Swift_ appears before them as proud and beautiful as ever, the storm covers once again stowed away. Eruuk, Grir, and Kurzh have reached the ship, and there’s a bustle among the sailors as they prepare to make way.

“I hope we helped,” Thruuna finds himself saying. “I hate the thought of one of my people wandering restless so far from home.”

“So do I,” Ruulo says softly. She sighs again. “I’ve only been a witch for a year and a half, you know,” she continues, as they begin picking their way down the slope. “I’ve been studying more on magic in the last months, but there’s still so much I don’t understand. I do know that there were once many kinds of magic that are lost to us now, that still survive only in isolation, or superstition.”

“Like binding a ghost into the grave.”

“Yes. Exactly.” She draws her lip musingly between her teeth, her eyes distant, fixed on the horizon. “So who can say, if my kind of witchcraft made a difference at all? I just hope that… whoever they were, they know they’re still cared for.”

Thruuna just nods, and they say nothing else as they make their way back to the ship.

He finds Urig among the crew, helping to stow and tie down the new supplies they bartered from the village the night before. He is vibrant and full of life, Thruuna’s husband—his grey-green skin vivid in the morning light, his long black hair blowing in the breeze, his smile easy and laughing as he tosses the end of a rope to a crewmate. He catches sight of Thruuna as he jumps down into the hull next to the last of the crates, and turns towards him like sunrise over the mountains of the south.

Thruuna doesn’t think he will ever grow weary of the sight.

“Thruuna!” Urig cries, and abandons his task with an expression of heartfelt delight. Behind him Thruuna can see the orcs he was working with rolling their eyes to each other in good-natured exasperation, but Urig doesn’t notice or care. “How was it? Could you read the writing? Was the captain right, was it magic?”

Thruuna can’t find the words to explain. “I’ll tell you about it later,” he says, and wraps his arms around his husband’s waist, pressing his face down into the hollow of his neck and surrounding himself with the scent of Urig’s skin.

Urig’s laughter stills all at once, and he puts his arms over Thruuna’s shoulders, cradling the back of his head. “Are you alright?” he says.

Captain Vaar will be back soon, and _Salmon-Swift_ will sail—and Thruuna will be with his husband, who is the only home he could possibly have that’s ever been worth knowing. No matter where he goes, no matter where he one day dies, he will not need a cairn or an inscription to keep him from searching out his home—just the knowledge that Urig was with him in the end.

“Yes,” he says. “I’m alright.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [twitter](http://twitter.com/october_burns). I have a [blog](http://octoberburns.wordpress.com). Come chat writing and book recs with me! And if you like my stories, I'd love it if you'd help support my work.


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